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Toury's Translation Norms

Ilahn Ungerer 30124670 LPRA 311 Assignment 2

Introduction

Who was Gideon Toury?

Gideon Toury was born on the 6th of June 1942 in Haifa Israel (Gambier, 2016). In 1970, Toury graduated with an honours degree in Hebrew language and literature. He completed a PhD Literary Theory in 1977 based on the topic of Translational Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew. His main research was that of translation and descriptive translation studies, with emphasis on the Hebrew translation of the Bible (Gambier, 2016). Toury died on the 4th of October 2016.

Gideon Toury

What is a norm?

Norm: (Noun) A norm is something that is usual, typical or standard pattern, especially of social behaviour that is expected (OED Online, 2020).

What is a norm?

Rules, Conventions and Idiosyncrasies:

Rules: objective, formal and legal

1

Conventions: informal

2

Rules, Conventions and Idiosyncrasies

Idiosyncrasies: subjective

3

Toury's definition of a Norm:

Norms are related to a specific time, society and culture.

Therefore: translation is a motion that is controlled by norms and these norms determine the level of equivalence reached in translation (Munday, 2012:170).

Toury's definition of norms:

translation of general values or ideas that is shared by a community of that what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable into performance instructions appropriate for particular situations (Munday,2012:170).

Toury's definition of a norm

Toury's focus on the translation product analysis

1

From the examination of texts, the products of norm-governed activity which shows the regularities of behaviour (Munday, 2012:171).

Toury focuses on the analysis of the translation product. He states this in order to identify the decision- making process of the translator (Munday, 2012:171). Norms that have prevailed the translation of a text can be constructed from two types of sources:

Toury's focus on the translation product analysis

2

From the explicit statements made about norms by translators, publishers, reviewers and other participants in the translation process (Munday, 2012:171).

Translation as a norm-governed activity

Being a text in a certain language.

Translation as a Norm-governed activity

Translation is an activity that involves two languages, two cultural traditions and at least two sets of norm-systems (Venuti, 2012: 200). The value may be described as consisting of two elements namely:

Constituting a representation in that language of another belonging to some other culture and occupying a definite position within it (Venuti, 2012: 200).

The three main types of norms

Three types of Norms

Toury distinguishes between three main types of norms operating at different stages of the translation process:

Preliminary norms

Basic initial norms

Operational norms

Preliminary norms are norms that play a role before the actual translation takes place (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 202). There is focused on two main sets of considerations, namely the translation policy and the directness of translation.

Operational norms refer to the presentation and linguistic matter of the target text (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 202). There is focused on matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms.

The basic initial norm refers to a general choice that a translator makes. Therefore, a translator can subject him/herself to the norms realized in the ST or to the norms of the target culture/language (Munday, 2012:171). If it is towards the ST, then the TT will be adequate. If the target culture norms prevail, then the TT will be acceptable (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 201).

Matricial norms: refer to the comprehensiveness of the TT. Phenomena consist of omission or transfer of passages, textual segmentation and the addition of passages or annotations (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 202).

Translation policy: factors defining the selection of texts for translation in a particular language, culture or time. It also refers to the text types or individual texts to be imported through translation (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 202). Different policies may relate to different subcategories based on text-types or human agents and groups thereof.

The types of norms

Textual-linguistic norms: direct the selection of material to formulate the target text or to replace the original textual and linguistic material with. Textual-linguistic norms may be general or particular, in which case they would pertain to a particular text-type and/or mode of translation only (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 203).

Directness of translation: relates to whether translation occurs through an intermediate language (e.g. Afrikaans to Zulu via English). Questions for studies include the acceptance of the TT culture to this practice. In other words, it is the acceptance for translating from languages other than the ultimate source language which asks if it is permitted (Munday, 2012:171 & Venuti, 2012: 202).

Laws of translation

Laws of Translation

Laws of Translation: Toury hopes that the identification of his norms will enable the formulation of laws of translation and the universals of translation (Munday, 2012:173). Toury proposes two laws namely the laws of growing standardization and the laws of interference.

Laws of translation

What's on your mind?

Information

Haifa

Israel

0137457220

Law of growing standardization

Law of growing standardization

These laws states that in translation textual relations obtaining in the original are modified in favour of habitual options offered by a target repertoire. This refers to the disruption of the ST patterns in translation and selection of linguistic options that are more common in the TL (Munday, 2012:173).

Law of interference

Which sees interference from ST to TT as a default. Interference refers to ST linguistic features being copied in the TT negatively (Creation of non-normal TT patterns) or positively (patterns in the ST are an option or known in the TT). Interference depend on sociocultural factors (Munday, 2012:173) .

Results & Criticism

Results and criticism of Toury's Theories

Toury's results

Toury's methodology of translation norms has been an important step into establishing foundations for future work.

Results

Gentzler lists four impacts that Toury's theory had on translation studies:

1.) the possibility of literary/linguistic equivalence.

2.) the involvement of literary tendencies within the target cultural system.

3.) the destabilization of the notion of an original message with a fixed identity.

4.) the integration of the original and translated text (Venuti, 2012: 115).

Type message...

Criticism on Toury's Theories

4hrs

There is still a wish to generalize since the laws of Toury are simply reformulations of generally-held beliefs about translation (Pym, 1998: 109). Hermans ask how it is possible to know all the variables relevant to translation and to find laws relevant to all translation (Munday, 2012:175).

Toury's two laws seem to be contradictory: the law of growing standardization depicts TL-oriented norms while the laws of interference is ST-oriented.

Criticism

There will always be criticism!

Return Potential Curve

One division that can be re-interpreted with the aid of this model is tripartite:

Studying Translation norms

Basic (primary) norms: more or less mandatory for all instances of a

certain behaviour.

Shows the distribution of approval/disapproval among the members of a social group over a range of behaviour of a certain type as a model for the representation of norms (Venuti, 2012:208).

Studying translation norms?

The two major resources for a reconstruction of translation norms (Venuti, 2012:208):

Secondary norms: or tendencies, determining favourable behaviour.

Textual: the translated texts themselves .

Tolerated (permitted) behaviour: occupies the rest of the positive part of the curve and therefore of minimal intensity.

Extra-textual: semi-theoretical or critical formulations.

The curve model enables us to redefine an additional concept: the actual degree of conformity (Venuti, 2012:208).

Conclusion

Conclusion & Bibliography

Norms have played a great role in descriptive translation studies, because (Toury, 1995) “it is norms that determine the equivalence manifested by actual translations” (Munday, 2012:169).

The concept of norms has become of major importance within Translation Studies, particularly in DTS. Toury’s attempt to be objective, descriptive and precise when analysing them has encouraged a new approach towards translation practice, tackling features which had been overlooked, like the existence of norms operating in the production of translated texts (Venuti, 2012:208).

Therefore norms are important! :) ;)

55 minutes ago

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Bibliography

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THE REFERENCER

Nelspruit, South Africa

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29 May 2020

Sources used

Gambier, Y. 2016. European Society for Translation Studies: Gideon Toury, translation scholar, died on 4 October 2016 at the age of 74. https://web.archive.org/web/20170119012728/http://www.est-translationstudies.org/news/2016_toury.html Date of access: 26 May 2020.

Munday, J. 2012. Introducing translation studies: theories and applications. 3rd edition. London: Routledge. pp. 169-190.

Pym, A., 1998. Okay, so how are translation norms negotiated? A question for Gideon Toury and Theo Hermans. Current Issues in Language & Society, 5(1-2), pp.107-113.

Toury, G. 2012. The nature and role of norms in translation. (In Venuti, L., ed. The translation studies reader. 3rd edition. London: Routledge. pp. 168-181.)

Final Word

This has been Toury's translation norms.

Presented by:

Ilahn Ungerer. Student at NWU University, South Africa.

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